could not have helped seeing that her sister was almost stunned at
times.

Kate gave her a fine opening. As she stood brushing her wealth of
gold with full-length sweeps of her arm, she was at an angle that
brought her facing the mirror before which Nancy Ellen sat
training waves and pinning up loose braids. Her hair was
beautiful and she slowly smiled at her image as she tried
different effects of wave, loose curl, braids high piled or flat.
Across her bed lay a dress that was a reproduction of one that she
had worn for three years, but a glorified reproduction. The
original dress had been Nancy Ellen's first departure from the
brown and gray gingham which her mother always had purchased
because it would wear well, and when from constant washing it
faded to an exact dirt colour it had the advantage of providing a
background that did not show the dirt. Nancy Ellen had earned the
money for a new dress by raising turkeys, so when the turkeys went
to town to be sold, for the first time in her life Nancy Ellen
went along to select the dress. No one told her what kind of
dress to get, because no one imagined that she would dare buy any
startling variation from what always had been provided for her.

But Nancy Ellen had stood facing a narrow mirror when she reached
the gingham counter and the clerk, taking one look at her fresh,
beautiful face with its sharp contrasts of black eyes and hair,
rose-tinted skin that refused to tan, and red cheeks and lips,
began shaking out delicate blues, pale pinks, golden yellows. He
called them chambray; insisted that they wore for ever, and were
fadeless, which was practically the truth. On the day that dress
was like to burst its waist seams, it was the same warm rosy pink